


a murder on our mouths hardly as sweet

by clytemnestras



Category: Black Widow (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Anachronistic, Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Compliant, Character Study, Communication, Deaf Clint Barton, Dom/sub Undertones, F/F, F/M, Female-Centric, Heterosexual Sex, Lesbian Sex, Multi, Multiple Orgasms, Natasha-centric, Oral Sex, POV Bisexual Character, Phone Sex, Polyamory, Russian Mythology, Threesome - F/F/M, Voyeurism, explorations of PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-17
Updated: 2016-07-17
Packaged: 2018-07-24 16:18:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7514915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/pseuds/clytemnestras
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On foxes, and wolves. (And love.)</p><p>  <i>Comfort becomes a long, tangled, international game of telephone; only the numbers change every three weeks and her cell tends to get ruined beyond repair before she has the chance to transfer the information.</i></p><p>  <i>Comfort, actually, is a long game of private espionage. She hunts the numbers, is careful for their safety (privacy, which is the same thing, which is how when nobody can imagine you you cannot possibly exist), keeps everybody in stasis within her chest, only disturbing them when she fears the motion there has stopped</i></p><p> </p><p>(set all around Utron, pre, during, and post - mostly post. A year or so in the life of Natasha Romanov.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	a murder on our mouths hardly as sweet

**Author's Note:**

> unbeta'd, written over four nights and lots of painkillers, mostly on a phone. it gets a little weird. tagging was hard.
> 
> a/n 1: every pairing listed is explored in detail because I don't believe in sideparings. yay for polyamory?
> 
> a/n 2: I'm still learning russian, and the russian in this was run through about eight online translators, please correct me if anything is wrong!
> 
>  
> 
> (insp: _when i said i was hollow i didn’t say who carved it._ from [x](http://un-seelies.tumblr.com/post/129304893678/anexitlike-i-went-to-the-city-they-said-what) and _there are wolves in the night / wolves and girls_ from that glorious nat/elecktra scene in _the name of the rose._ segment titles from _a primer for small weird loves_ by Richard Siken)

  1. **You take the things you love and tear them apart**



 

The rain is a cool blessing against Natasha’s face. Her skin is all blood blood blood rushing toward the surface, fingers never twitching for her guns, or knives. In the moment she is one goal (two goals, always: keep them safe, complete the mission; the first is eternal and unspoken) and a series of synapses, ready, wanting, vital.

It’s been years since she last saw St Petersburg.

The street is a beacon of distrustful quiet, enough people that the sound should be roaring off the buildings and echoing towards the sky. She can hear the rain bouncing off the gutters.

“Clear shot?” Steve in her ear, firm, focused, reliable. They are not team, she tells herself. They are machinery. Be reliable, be on target.

Except - “There's someone blocking, another suit, notably the _same_ suit. Matching clothes. I'm pretty sure we're walking into an ambush here.”

Speaking, and still walking, no attention need be drawn. The neatly placed cafe tables sprawl out onto the cobblestones as if opening for her.

“Speak for yourself. I’m pretty sure I’m just _watching_ an ambush here.” The tone of Clint’s voice belies his focus. She can feel his eyes on her back, his shot poised for inches ahead of her and moving as she walks. He won't let her be a casualty.

Steve is calling him out on the frequency but Natasha is still watching the table, four men in suits dining on oats and pitch-dark coffee, the newspapers spread open across the table, a briefcase tucked under each seat.

She smiles at the waitress who glances her way. Natasha stops her, slipping into her mother tongue. “ _Izvinite_ ,” _excuse me._ She touches the waitress’s arm gently, smiles, makes herself personable and soft. “ _Vy možete mne skazat’, gde petyr sidit_?” _Can you please tell me where Petyr is sitting?_

Clint swears in her ear. “Don't get hurt, Tas, I will have to kill you, and I hate killing my friends, I really do.”

The waitress smiles back. Her eyes are green, but shift in the growing light; Natasha thinks they have the colour of branches on a fir tree beginning to rot, and her guts seem to tangle. The waitress places her hand on the small of Natasha's back and directs her to the table that smells of cold porridge and sharp coffee, four men in suits all looking her from hair to heel.  
  
She is stopped in front of Petyr, and the waitress whispers something in his ear before smiling and leaving them be. Natasha is small and sure in her greeting. “Petyr?” She smiles, holds her hands out, and he takes them. It's exactly the politeness she was banking on.

Natasha slips the syringe from her raincoat sleeve and stabs Petyr in the wrist. He does not yelp in pain, just slumps forward then falls, crashing into the table.

Natasha screams. She yells for help in English and Russian, taps on Petyr's wrist and checks his pulse which is slowed but not stopped, the other men scrambling around him in blind panic bar one whose eyes are cold and unaffected.

_Bingo._

“I’m almost positive this was not our plan, Natasha.” Steve is stern and concerned in her ear piece. She brings her cuff to her mouth and whispers to the microphone. “Are you close by, ready to have my back?”

“Of course”, Steve says.

“Roger that”, Clint says.

“Good”, she says, and throws herself onto the collapsed man, wailing. Not reliable. Improvisational. Do whatever to get the mission done. Deviate. Divert. (Keep everyone safer than you keep yourself.) The men begin to panic, dragging over the waitress and screaming into their phones, everything a circus of confusion and motion. It's perfect.

She dives under the table and grabs the briefcase under the stoic businessman's chair, tapping on it to hear the thumb drives rattle. He sees her as she slides out, already running, and goes to yell before an electrified arrow finds his throat. He goes down quietly, rendered unconscious.

If there is any serious perusal, Natasha does not catch it. She runs straight, avoids getting close enough to civilians to catch them under fire and keeps her footfalls sure in the rain. Everything is a hazard, her hands poised to slide the shurikens from her thigh holster and take down. With Steve in her ear telling her where to avoid crowds, Clint guiding her away from any triggers close by (Russia is Russia, a home and hell), and the sound of men falling under fire at her back, she doesn't get the chance. It's been only minutes when Natasha gets to the designated safe location, out of breath and full to bursting with adrenaline.

“Not using your guns today?”

Natasha smiles, veins hopping, breath not caught but strong enough to carry her as she leaps towards Bruce, letting him catch her around the waist. “Thought I’d let Clint do his job for once,” she says, resting her forehead where it lands against his shoulder, big hands keeping her up.

“A good friend move.” Bruce agrees. He carries her over to a large wooden chair, but instead of dropping her in it he sits himself, holding her close in his lap. “That was a dangerous tactic. Could have gotten yourself killed if any one of those mooks drew a gun quicker.”

Natasha sighs. “You should know well, Doctor, that no one draws faster than me. I’m prepared. I scan the space for threats before any decision.” _I would rather risk my life than anyone else's._

He pulls her in tighter. “That was dangerous”, he says again, as though the meaning has changed.

Natasha drops the briefcase over his shoulder and wraps both arms around his neck.

 

*

 

Laura’s skin catches light in a different way to Clint’s, despite the way their bodies fan out together, entwined and symbiotic. Natasha watches their chests move in sleep, inhalations matched close to perfect until she can hardly stand it, screwing her eyes shut and pressing herself deep into the covers. She is cold, her chest hushed, her thoughts disquieting. Her toes point and flex under the sheets.

Good toes. Naughty toes. It’s a thoughtless movement from the bases of her programming, somewhere between a comfort and something more sinister. Deep down the muscles have started to cramp but she keeps going, good toes, naughty toes, until the aching in her guts seems minimal by comparison.

This is not her safe. Theirs. Not hers. Despite any insistence that they are all owned in part by one another, Natasha is nobody's wife, or mother, and she may be Clint’s before she is the world's, but Clint is Laura's above that. He must always come home to the farm.

Something rustles in the hush and it's a task not to startle and sink into instinct.  A rough hand skids up her thigh to still her leg. With a slow breath she opens her eyes to see where Clint has stretched across the bed, across Laura, to put a point of contact between them all. She touches his hand and lifts it without a word, bringing it to her mouth and kissing the pads of each finger.

His aids have long been discarded and she knows he can read her lips, but the moment feels fraught with quiet, so she raises both hands and signs _I can't sleep._

He looks at her for a long moment. _Don't leave. I know you will. Don't._

She shakes her head and slides her leg out from beneath the covers, wants to move before the morning smothers her.

Clint reaches over again, grabbing her wrist and tugging gently until she eases onto her side, and pulls her back just enough that she's curled against Laura’s side.

Laura opens her eyes and twists so Clint can see her face. “What are you two being so loud about?” She's smiling slightly, but her eyebrows are sunk together.

Clint kisses her on the forehead. He’s always horribly loud without the aids, and he continues signing for her. _Nat was going to sneak out._

Laura raises and eyebrow and twists so Natasha can't see what she replies. Over her shoulder, Clint is smiling.

He slides out of the bed and walks around until he's beside her, getting back in and sliding up along her back. His arms span her waist. Laura touches Natasha's cheek and kisses her once on the mouth. Her fingers are rough from manual labour and feel a familiar comfort where they stroke her cheeks. Her growing belly is a weight against her front.

“If you leave, I’ll have to kill you”, Laura whispers, and curls up, her face tilted toward Natasha on the shared pillow.

They press her in, their warmth inescapable, aiming to quell the disconnect in her chest.

It's hard to say how successful they are, but after a long struggle, Natasha sleeps.

 

*

 

_(Beasts are beasts are raw shape-changed things; a woman with soul that bleeds venom and the man that holds both their weights in scarred hands, a man with a fusion core for a heart, another with sepia nightmares that wakes with cold hands, a pacing creature with a shaken man wrapped around it._

_The god is a god (and nothing is so mortal as that.)_

_Bruce tends to glance up at her, quietly over the meeting table - the Stark Industries kitchen, the Tower sofas, the helicarrier dashboard, the rest of the noise - and. They glance, and, breathe, and, touch, and. Their exchanges are often this, in the loudness carved out by Tony and Thor - and all of them, really - two finding introversion, the haunted or hunted. Glances and almost spoken words and rarely glimpsed smiles._

_It would take him time, before, to notice when she had slipped into his lab or snuck up behind him in the common areas. She would be silent, and he would be sunk deep into his own skull, not looking for interruptions because he's grown unused to expecting them._

_He first notices, really notices when he wakes up in a small crater carved into the floor of an old warehouse, Natasha breathing quietly beside him. He notices the presence of another warm body before he sees her, hand reaching out to touch her and there is a quick startle, her hand jerking away before she lets it fills his._

_Beasts are beasts, caged beasts, frightened beasts. Bruce touches her hand across the breakfast bar and mouths sorry._

_She says, “Not your sorry.”_

_The convention is broken, simple as that.)_

 

*

 

Laura has never taken issue with being left alone at the farm.

(She should, Natasha thinks. A woman should never exist in secret. A woman should never be happy to be hidden and untouched by society, should be angry-shaking-fragile and human, openly so; should be able to dine with friends and cry in club bathrooms and touch everyone they walk past in the street as if they exist only by the notice of others. She should be able to hold her head to the sky in a packed street, recognise her own face and be calm. No woman should be a secret.)

Natasha always tries to drop by when Clint is on solos. The other Avengers think she's running intel, checking up on her boy. She is, in her own way.

Laura will sit sometimes with her hands wrapped around a mug of camomile tea - looking out a window, watching the news, staring for hours at the blank screen of her phone - and a child asleep on either side of her and she will crumble away to nothingness, a resigned look behind her eyes. Wife and mother means something different when your husband runs with Gods, rescues lost souls that could kill him with a touch.

She is terrified of the day it means widow.

Natasha gently prises the mug from her fingers and takes Laura by the hand

There's little resistance when she pulls her up the stairs and even less when she strips her in the cold light of the bathroom. She sits Laura in the bathtub and blasts the shower, lathering her hands and washing Laura's hair gently as the woman sobs. The sound never raises over the rush of water.

She eases Laura into a bathrobe and then into bed. The kids trail behind her like ducklings until she shoos them up to their room. She has a child swinging on each arm and on the dismount they demand she chase around the landing, floorboards creaking under her feet.

She smiles and indulges, easily leaping across the carpet, catching Cooper with one arm and tickling him into submission. She then hunts Lila around the dressers, ducking down to the floor and finally catching her by the ankle, half hidden under her bed.

They fall asleep easy, after. She only tells one story, one of a girl who was also a wolf - who struck a knife in a tree when she was hungry and _named herself wolf_ \- hunting soldiers that strayed from their units through the soft-trodden snow.

Clint calls late that night on a burner phone that Tony kindly tricked out to make virtually untraceable. Natasha makes sure he has one everywhere.

“Okay”, he says, sounding far away and short of breath. “This looks bad.”

“Don't be stupid, Barton. None of us can afford it.” Her voice on the end of the phone feels insubstantial. Helpless is not her favourite feeling.

“Don't you trust me, baby?” His panting subsides as laughter seeps through his words and it does nothing to increase her confidence. He’s always reckless with humour in his voice.

“When I'm not there to save your ass?”

He laughs harder. “And what a beautiful ass it is.” Clint hums, and she can see in her mind’s eye the way he’s tapping the side if his head, to feel the vibration. “Could be a day or two more. I think I've got it covered and Hill has eyes on me.” It's an unspoken, (unnecessary), if _anything happens, you’re the first call._

“I’m frankly shocked you just let a pun pass you by. Must be really rough out there.” She breathes, feels the itch down in her veins. Natasha needs to _do. Run. Fight_. She is a bad sidelines player.

“I’m hanging my head in shame.” His voice shifts slightly, an ease bleeding through. “Lor around?”

He knows without asking where she is, what she does, unraveled to him until bare.

“Resting. It's hard for her, I think. Hormones, worry, boredom. And I hear people grow fond of your face after a while. Who knew?”

“Wow, I’m wounded.” He stops, stops, stops, and it goes on for time enough she notices her own breath on the receiver. “I won't be long, Nat, please just. You're good with them. Keep 'em till I get back.”

She's looking at her reflection in the window. Lit up by the landing, Laura is lying across the hall, eyes opening periodically to watch her, too far to hear what they're saying.

“We can't keep this up”, she says, and listens to the wavery sigh on the end of the line.

“ _Tas_.”

“Okay, okay”, she turns towards Laura, sitting up in bed and looking at her like she can see through to bone.

Natasha walks towards her and lays cell on the bedside table, kissing Laura deeply. She does not hang up the call. She tugs open the knot on Laura’s dressing gown and unveils her body, kissing the soft skin of her pregnancy bump and up, a kiss to her breastbone and another to her throat.

She wonders if Clint can hear the gasp over the phoneline when she takes his wife’s breast into her mouth. She wonders if he can hear it when she drifts down Laura’s body and holds her legs open, fingers stroking down her thighs as her mouth drinks her in.

 

*

 

Clint is at her back when the first wave of fire comes. They slide as one, him ducking and releasing three arrows at once, her sliding across his back and deploying bullets in an arch across the sky. They move before they can check how many shots land.

The path is careful, Fury in her ears and Clint watching her steps, aids blown out by the mark’s HQ explosion detonated by his 'splodie arrow. (It will be later, when they are bruised and untangling themselves that she will threaten his risk. He will say _deviate, divert, do whatever to get the mission done._ She will punch the yellowest bruise on his bicep.)

She is not familiar with Baghdad the way she is with most places and it makes her nerves waver ever so beneath her skin. Clint is deaf to them all and the landscape is unknown and her mind is awash with _risk, risk, risk._

The gunfire takes a short reprieve, presumably to reload and Natasha grabs the opportunity with the grace of Gods. She scans the area fast, Fury yelling to fire and go back for the files and she blocks him out.She pulls on Clint's wrist and ducks behind a clay-coloured building, following the short lane until she catches sight of a real road. The first vehicle she spots is liberated from it's shouting driver, quieted once he catches sight of the gun poking from her jacket.

Fury curses a blue streak in her ear and dirt clouds up in an arc outside the car when she slams it into reverse and turns, sliding into the busiest lane and hoping to get them lost in the pandemonium.

Clint looks at her with a wry expression, taking the time to clip on his seatbelt and adjust his glasses. “This looks safe!” He yells, and she signs something to the effect of _keep it_ _down, you loud prick._

He snorts and grabs the wheel, nodding outside. Natasha catches sight of the car three lanes along, five cars back, dark blue and nondescript but for the brutal silver bumper, spattered lightly with red. The facial scar only just visible through the dimmed windscreen matches their mark. Natasha grins and rolls down the window.

It's easy if only for her stature to push herself up, out, poised on the bottom ledge of the car window, one arm keeping her balanced, the other shooting her gun. Clint clips off his belt and replaces her foot on the gas, weaving between lanes. She gets three clean shots through the windscreen and a few to the bonnet, Clint slowing them enough once her view is clear that she can aim with minimal damage to civilians.

She slides back into the car when the chase gives way. She tightens her fingers on the steering wheel, and rakes her eyes across the road. Clint is still tense beside her, eyes constantly flicking between the car mirrors. Fury has gone quiet in her ear, which leaves them vulnerable - too open to go back to the safehouse, lest a straggler from the hunt is still trailing them. Clint looks at her searchingly, one hand still resting on the wheel and moving with her motions.

She turns off on the next corner and stops, looking out at the dusty street.

She signs _how long do you think we can drive for, without stopping?_

“We can only find out!” He yells, and kisses her, the hand from the steering wheel a warm weight on her thigh.

 

*

 

_(Laura calls, a small moment carved out when Bruce is checking her for internal damage and everyone is dotted around in various states of sleep across the tower, Clint collapsed over on the sofa, never having made it out of the living room._

_“Please, Tasha, nothing reckless. We can’t afford to lose you.”_

_Bruce tells her laughter will be unkind to the bruises on her ribs._

_“And Lord Almighty, don’t let Clint do anything stupid.”_

_Natasha looks at where Clint is sleeping, sprawled across the sofa, and sees the familiar crease in his brow._

_She drops her voice low, here, and Bruce takes a step back. “You mean_ make a different call _stupid?”_

_“Don’t make me come after you, Nat”, Laura says, a smile laced through the threat. “No baby can weigh me down.”_

_Natasha smiles to herself and Bruce leaves quietly, packing up his medical equipment and moving them back to his lab. She watches him go from the corner of her eye and doesn’t allow herself to follow. (There will be time enough for that later.)_

_Natasha holds the phone to her ear as Laura tells her stories of the baby kicking and Cooper bringing pictures home from school scribbled out in crayon, a girl with red hair and a blood-soaked mouth that he calls_ Volchitsa _. She finds herself smiling at that and sits on the sofa’s edge, waiting for Clint to make space enough for her.)_

 

*

 

First seeing the twins opens up something in Natasha, a channel in her mind between clairvoyance and memory.

There are still dancers on the inside of her eyelids, the easy arc of her legs in grand jeté, cutting through a jaw or ribcage as practised as air. Her body is a home to needles and knives, laced back up like corsetry. She is red eyes and red hands and cold cold cold.

_Ostorožny, malen’kaja lisa. (Careful, little fox.)_

Bruce is a warm weight beside her. Clint is Clint, is already weakened to the cause, a stray magnet of a man. Forever the hero with a hero complex. He will sermonise, and lay roughened hands on their young heads and he will hurt to change them.

He will be right to. (If she doesn't believe that _he is right to change_ every stitch of her will unravel.)

_Éto to, čto vy es. (This is what you are.)_

Bruce is muttering things to her in the quiet, a counterpoint to the those stumbling from her mouth, commands that live between her skin and her ribcage. She knows he is more fearful than she of what lies inside, and yet. (Try as he does, he cannot carry the weight of his sins in his hands when they are not truly his hands. She is she, cannot take off her skin and be human again, but she can slip. Little foxling, all red fur, all steel claws, all teeth.)

_Letal’nyj suka. (A lethal bitch.)_

He is whispering something sweet, songlike. It taps at the back of her mind, behind the harshness of her mother tongue.

The sudden blossom of heat on her knee, the weight of a head tilted into her and cradled by her body shocks her from stupor for a moment and she hears him, really hears him, for the first time. On her knees he is shaking.

_“Out came the sunshine and dried up all the rain. So itsy bitsy spider climbed up the spout again.”_

It hits her like laughter and she fights to not manifest it in tears.

Her fingers wrap themselves in his hair and she strokes in time to his soft song.

 

*

 

_(There are long moments in the dark room where her skull aches and she feels helpless and close to death. She doesn’t sleep, of course, slips instead between functionally awake and semi-conscious daydreams that haze around the space; one too many times she jerks upright with the muscle memory twitching in her hands of having talked Ultron into a stupor and slit his core like an artery. Waking is harder._

_Still, she talks. Talks Ultron angry and destructive and weak. Her cunning is a never disused skill, the fox of fables that can hunt the weaker and outsmart the large. Ultron thinks himself a bear but even bears have fragilities. She talks Tony, talks the twins, talks the shared burden of being something somehow less than human and counts the seconds._

_She is ready to die there, but she likes to think she has caused him damage first. If she is an entry wound, she will be glad of the legacy._

_“Simon says make your father proud”, she says, and waits for the violence.)_

 

 

  
**2\. Or you pin them down with your body and pretend they’re yours**

 

The first mission after the fall of Sokovia is Berlin. Wanda sits very quietly in the back of the quinjet and refuses to let anyone touch her, lest their fingers begin to fry at the tips.

Natasha does not try to get close. She watches from the front of the vehicle, tilted back to properly view the girl.

Wanda mutters things to herself, crossing and uncrossing her legs and lifting dense cubes of snapping red light between her palms until they collapse under the weight of themselves.

Natasha thinks, _gone._  She thinks, _lose and lose and lose again._

She starts talking, not really loud enough to command attention but enough that Wanda is listening, watching how her mouth moves.

“Losing someone is a knife.”

(Steve snaps round at this, searching her for dual meanings. They are still, as ever, trailing after Barnes; a delayed shadow to a fleeting ghost.)

Natasha breathes. “I would crush up the loss, was trained to press it between my hands or thighs until it cracked like a skull.

“One night all of Russia was burning and we were all running from the gunfire. The Academy had been raided in the middle of the night and these monsters of ours, these great and terrible creators were dying at out feet and it felt like _loss_ \- another parent to lose, I suppose - and we all crushed it. My sisters, real or imagined or bonded through blood rituals were cut away and I crushed it. Partners and lovers left in a red trail behind my feet and I crushed all feeling away. I let it crush _me_. It is after, it is now, that I feel those losses more keenly than any taken by my own hands. We cannot destroy our losses, no matter how painful. We carry them on our backs. And we endure.” Her accent slips in a practiced move, closer to Wanda’s own.

Wanda looks from her mouth to her eyes in a long and unsettling motion. “We endure?”

Natasha doesn't speak. She nods once and lets her story settle in the air.

Steve touches her shoulder, to soothe, she supposes. She does not speak of the Old Country often, memories sown so easily with blood they tend to embolism if disturbed. She leans into the touch just enough to calm him, and shuts her eyes to calm herself. Sam begins breathing deeply, in the guided way he sometimes slips into, waiting for everyone to slowly sync up.

“Endure”, Wanda says. “I like this word.”

 

*

 

_(It is on the farm, after Fury has left, when everyone is a flutter of motion around them, battle-roused and vengeful._

_He says (after this,) he is going, must go,_ and _._

 _She understands, presses his hand to her chest,_ and _._

 _She pulls him on top of her, kisses his throat and chest and mouth,_ and, and, and _._

 _He says_ wait _, says_ no _, says_ what if I?

_Natasha picks up the overclocked stun-gun from the bedside table - a hybrid gift from Asgard - and says, “I will subdue you if I need to. I won’t need to.”_

_He goes to say what if and she presses her finger to his mouth. Trades it for her own mouth, open and tired._

_There are floundering, supersaturated thoughts flooding the kisses, her eyes squeezed so tightly shut that she is starting to fade in the greyed out space behind the lids, everything thrown into this, into him, so emotions might be drowned by the physical._

_She opens herself up, her forehead not reaching far enough along his body to touch his, but she arcs up so he might kiss her as he presses his fingers inside. His thumb is a rough but sure weight on her clit and he keeps her present, tight little circles that make her spine shake._

_She spreads her legs wide wide wide and lets his mouth devour her, a big hand on each thigh keeping her still and spread for him. He seals his mouth around her clit and slides his fingers back, pushing and pushing her into the crest and still, after, his tongue not allowing her reprieve. He licks her from bottom to top, keeping her twitchy and dewy-wet, keeping her writhing under his hands, fingers still curled and tongue diving between them until she's pushing back, until she's wanting and grinding down, all ache ache ache inside. He draws his tongue over her clit again just relentless and she begins to shake, her body quivering and opening up until she's splitting down the middle, big as the room and big as the air._

_Every touch is a brand on her skin spelling something to remember and her muscles twinge at the thought. She grabs him hard, head between sure fingers and strong body between deadly legs and she hauls him up for a kiss, legs twisted around him so she can flip them. She looks at him, small form spread flush against his body and he kisses her again, running his fingers through her hair. He touches her face when she sits up, his hand on her jaw when she raises herself and sinks down on him._

_She leans down as much as possible, his hands chasing her skin, thumbs this side of rough on her breasts, catching her nipples in circles that make her sweat. She grinds herself down hard as she can, wants to keep everything dirty and sloppy like it erodes the meaning of the moment._

_She rubs herself in time with his stuttered breaths, the hand she's using to brace herself chasing the sweat on his chest and she comes like that, pressed tight against him, pressing her mouth to his jaw._

_They sleep,_ and _._

_(After,)_

_He leaves,_ and _._

 _(He leaves, and has a burner phone in his pocket, one of hers, or Clint's, only one number programmed into it. She speaks when it's safe, when it's all quiet in the wilderness and he laughs at the sound of her voice on the phone, frustrated at the reception and the distance and the fact that Clint is behind her making kissy faces and this is everything, not_ and, _just this.))_

 

*

 

“Tasha”, Laura is sobbing on the end of the phone and Natasha is in the middle of Brazil on a mission and Clint is at the farm and Laura is _sobbing on the end of the phone._

Natasha checks the hotel room for bugs and lies back on the rather dingy bed. “Lor, I’m here, what is it?”

“No, Nat, you’re not.” Laura breathes heavily. “I’m sorry”, she says. “The baby - Nate, not _the baby_ , _God -_ it's hormones and no sleep and Clint is having muscle aches in his shoulders again and I. You haven't stopped by for months.”

Natasha’s chest constricts. The walls of the hotel room might shake and blow away, warping under the strain of the moment, the bed not even dipping under her weight.

“I’ll be there. When I’m back in the country, okay? And hold it together until I am. Lord knows Clint won't.”

Laura laughs, or sniffs back and swallows.”I always do.”

“I love you”, Natasha says, tracing the outline of the debriefing envelope.

“I love you, too.” The sentence is short, and that’s not to say there’s less meaning behind it but it does say Laura is a small voice over the phone thinking something she’s fighting to say.

Natasha waits, reading through her mission notes, _drug baron, superserum-esque, improbable consequences for mankind as we know it, blah blah blah, infiltrate, disarm, disable._ She gets as far as location information, houses, safehouses and drug dens before her thoughts are disturbed.

“What’s Rio like now?”

Natasha is thrown bodily back into the room and into the conversation, miles away from attack strategies and drug trades. The phone is pressed between her shoulder and ear, the ironic familiarity of hostage situations not lost on her. “It’s hot, it’s gorgeous, it’s dangerous. It is every other place, Lor.”

Laura makes a small sound. “I miss it, sometimes”, she says, voice shrinking as though scared back into her throat. “Seeing everything through underground eyes. I miss holding the whole damn world in my hands and choosing to fight for it.” She breathes again, in for three, out four. “But keeping the farm together makes Fury’s drills look easy.”

“It was a sad day we lost you to motherhood.” Natasha re-scans the profiles of the gang she’s going after. She hates this part, inactive and reliant on other’s intel, always a margin for distrust. “Hill hasn’t forgiven Barton to stealing you quite yet.”

“I’m sure Maria will find love again.” There’s a sharp wail in the background of the call and Nat is almost loathe to let her go. Clint is there, though. Clint will keep them all okay.

Natasha turns the page on the report and begins sharpening her knives.

 

*

 

In the night, sometimes Wanda will creep the hallways, sparks trailing her steps when she is too tired to hold them inside herself. Natasha has found her too many nights curled in the corner of rooms sleeping the fitful sleep of the bereaved, or still standing, eyes red in her pale face as blood seeped through snow.

Natasha touches her and it’s a system flood, _fourhundredthousandseconds_ of v-i-o-l-e-n-c-e, rabid and blood-hungry black nightmare walking with a girl’s skin. She is tried and she is sore she is an ash-swept creature hidden under the dining table waiting for the sky to be on fire again.

She does not let go. Not that. Never that.

Shaking nightmared thing, Wanda is hardly a girl, she is sleep turned dark, she is collapsing into Natasha’s open arms, crying softly in the hush of the tower and curling up. “I saw you”, she says pressing her face into Natasha’s chest. “Before. You were one with monsters before you could make a choice, I have never seen horror like yours.”

“It could have been worse”, Natasha curls herself around Wanda, entwined on the carpet, a matched set of red and dark.

“No”, Wanda whispers. “It could not.”

 

*

 

Steve swipes for her jaw and misses, catches her by the thigh and she twists up and over, rolling out of his grip. The room is wide and padded, well equipped for any damage they might cause. The new Avenger’s facility is really being broken in nicely.

He’s smiling at her. “Could do this all day.”

“I don't tend to make time for that.” She let's him grab for her again and dives through his legs, twisting his wrist and sliding it with her as far as it will bend and until he pulls back hard, almost dragging her back before she manages to let go, unscathed and uncaptured. “Keep up, old man.”

She's smiling, too. They aren't the best sparring partners. They've grown too familiar with one another's style and their statures help none. They are built to battle different creatures entirely. Still, sometimes there's something to burn off, some energy or rage. A sadness, even.

Natasha twists round and grabs Steve by the neck and he swings her around so all her weight is lifted. He could throw her from here and cause damage, should she not land correctly. (She would.)

Instead he dips her down and she flips, using his neck as leverage, swinging backward until her back arches wholly and her feet reach the ground. “So”, he says, grabbing her by the hip and narrowly missing a foot to the jaw. “Bruce.”

Natasha flips back twice and grabs the rope which holds the punching bag, swinging round it and climbing to the metal rigging that spans the ceiling. “Bruce”, she says. “What about him?”

Steve laughs and grabs the gymnastic rings hanging from the rigging and holds himself up, muscles in his shoulders straining and the veins of his neck standing out. She sees him reaching for the metal rung she's perching on and moves a few inches back, just out of reach. “Well, he’s gone. And you were - hell, none of us really know what you were, but you sure as hell _were._ ”

He reaches forward and swings onto the rigging, making it rattle under his weight.

“Wouldn't want you to break your toys, Rogers, give up while you can.” She laughs and drops down onto the mats, looking up at him from the ground. “And believe me, Barton really does know what we _were._ ”

Steve climbs back to the hoops and swings onto the ground. “I don't doubt it”, he says. “Fine then. So, Wanda.”

Natasha walks over and pats him on the cheek. “Nice try.”

 

*

 

She plays the message to herself when she cannot sleep.

_This is tacky as hell but I’m missing your… everything, so I’m going to indulge myself here, no laughing. There are night blooming flowers where I am. These bright, beautiful things that blossom in the dark, and every night that I watch them unfurl I start to miss you._

“You’re a sap, Banner. Even worse than Barton.”

She smiles in the gloom of her bedroom and plays it again.

 

*

 

The decor of the room is gaudy and rich, as easy a cover as European socialite, and sparing no expense. Maria is an angel, when the mood strikes her. The bed is soft and extravagantly decorated, four carved oak posters and silken sheets. Even the carpet is soft beneath Natasha’s bare feet.

The perfume scent of the room makes her feel closer to her most savage self, dizzy and drunk on tiredness. Her makeup is a day old and like a mask on her skin, rendering her an _other,_ or perhaps _elsewhere._ It worries her how much like the old days this feels.

They are bundled together in the Italian hotel room, Wanda curled up atop the sheets on their double bed, watching Natasha do her stretches. This is memory superimposed over reality, one from St Petersburg, the studious look in Yelena’s eyes as she watched Natalia - no, _Natasha_ \- practise the day’s training, sequential movements carved through the air in rhythmic bursts, _one, two, three; slice, kick, sweep - one, two, three; uppercut, roundhouse, flip._

Wanda’s eyes are light, bright, wide over her. “I wish for you to teach me.”

It’s a moment where she is struck swiftly through the chest, sure the memory has bled through to the present. Natasha lets oxygen swell in her lungs and she drops her leg where it’s been held over her shoulder, rolling her head back on her neck. “Really?”

Wanda crawls off of the bed and sits at Natasha’s feet, face turned up as though searching the sky for God. Natasha bends so their faces are level and holds Wanda’s gaze. “I will teach you how to fight, and how to keep yourself safe on any mission. But tonight there is no time, and no reason to use up our energy on something we cannot finish.”

Wanda smiles at her, red tickling at the edges of her skin. “I would like that”, she says. “But what do we do for now?”

Natasha runs her fingers through Wanda’s hair, twisting it around her forefinger. “I can tell you the fairytales of Russia, the children adore them.” She smiles at the eyebrow Wanda raises.

“I’m tired of stories”, she says. “And I hope I do not need to remind you I am not a child.”

Wanda smiles darkly, eyes a bright point in the dusklit room. Her fingers inch upward to cradle Natasha’s face and she presses their mouths together.

Natasha is the one to pull back, opening her eyes slowly and touching Wanda’s fingers where they stroke her cheeks. “You must be sure.”

Wanda smiles and stands, holding her hand out. “Take me to bed, Natasha.”

Natasha gathers Wanda's scarf in one hand and pulls her forward, winding up the fabric until their faces are almost touching and her fist is a close ball of warmth beside Wanda’s throat. Natasha kisses her hard, kisses her with teeth sinking into her plush lower lip.

Wanda is pliant on the bed, open and wanting for her. Natasha spreads Wanda's legs for her, looks up from the spread of miles of pale skin to meet Wanda's smile, and bites down on the skin of her thighs. She bites and sucks marks like stars all across the skin, a smattering of lovebites spread across Wanda’s chest and stomach, harder and darker along the curves of her breasts. The sheets are cold and delicate and press them into their private world. Rough, savage girls made soft.

Electricity seems to bite reflection in Natasha's skin, and she drags herself down to where Wanda is begging for her. She pinches at Wanda's thighs and kisses where they white out, pulling close up to the apex and kissing open mouthed against her wetness, licking inside.

It's simple to disassemble Wanda like this, take her apart with carefully placed flickers of tongue, sucking and scraping her teeth just enough over her that Wanda keens and shorts the lights for a moment, looking down on her in the darkness.

Her insides ache, after, wanting wildly for something. She will take anything like reprieve. Natasha feels a twist between her legs like the warmth of a tongue and catches Wanda's smile.

“Tell me what you want to feel”, she says.

Natasha lies back.

 

*

 

Comfort becomes a long, tangled, international game of telephone; only the numbers change every three weeks and her cell tends to get ruined beyond repair before she has the chance to transfer the information.

Comfort, actually, is a long game of private espionage. She hunts the numbers, is careful for their safety (privacy, which is the same thing, which is how when nobody can imagine you you cannot possibly exist), keeps everybody in stasis within her chest, only disturbing them when she fears the motion there has stopped.

Bruce's voice is hairs on her spine standing to attention, wondering how sleepless he must be to miss her so, to not care for his own exile. She tells him _under no circumstances will you break me on Amsterdam_ and he laughs for long minutes across the distorted line at the image of Steve escaping a hostile situation on a stolen bicycle.

Whenever phone rings it’s like a voice on her neck breathing _I miss you._

When she is underground and undercover in a Ukrainian arms dealership, she picks up and says in an affected voice, “Baby, I miss you”, when the marks look her way.

Clint laughs softly in her ear. “ _Aw_ , Sweetie, I miss you _so much more_.” She decides swiftly that Clint Barton is a dead man. “Are you missing me so much you're wearing the little blue thing?”

“Oh baby, just because I’m not there doesn't mean I won't do something very _special_ when I get back.” She smacks her lips into the receiver and twists a finger through her loosely tied hair, watching the dark eyes watching her, every inch the girl in twisted adoration.

Clint makes a sound suspiciously like a gulp and she smiles at the stern-faced woman cleaning an AK.

When it is Wakanda, her employ as a guard for the young girl fifth in line to the throne, her new phone vibrates under her pillow.

“We are on mission.” Wanda's voice is a soft reminder, magic in a body, a new face from her old world of damage. “Clint is making baby noises into his phone. I cannot sleep.”

It is three in Wakanda, and their timezones must be close if both should be sleeping. The thought makes her smile. The night is over-warm and balmy, the thin blanket is mostly for comfort’s sake but is fitting enough to cover her head to foot as she presses the phone to her ear, to feel secretive. A two person enclave, one body, two voices. “What can I do to help?”

Wanda sighs. “I think. I think I have changed my mind about the stories, I am not too old to listen to you.”

Natasha rolls over, curls herself as small as she can make herself and lays the phone on her pillow. The heat it produces spills out and makes her feel closer somehow, like it fits with the measured pace of her breaths. “Let me tell you about Segurushka, a girl lost deep in the dark forest.”

She speaks until Wanda’s breathing slows, lulled to sleep with thoughts of foxes, both cunning and kind.

Perhaps it's that her heart is manifested like a telephone pole, rooted deep in the earth and stretching upwards. Her every arterial wire stretched across the globe, _stretched_ and never pulled. She wants and fuses herself to love, always reaching further.

The phone rings and it flashes up as _unknown_ in place of the unmarked numbers she can recite like breathing. Natasha lets it reach seven rings before raising it to her ear.

“Hello Tony, to what do I owe the pleasure?”

He makes an affronted noise into the phone. “I was so sure you were gonna answer with a kissy noise, maybe a poem. I’m very disappointed.”

Natasha tuts once, clicks her tongue off the roof of her mouth. “I worry for you, Stark.”

He laughs. “And why would that be?”

She taps at the phone speaker with one long fingernail, painted a deep scarlet to match the dress hanging on the doorframe, ready to grace the French Embassy's floors. “Because I’m almost certain if you don't stop this train of thought of yours your ability to think may cease altogether.” She pauses, takes a sip of tea. “And I’m sure I have Pepper’s number here somewhere.”

“Duly noted.”

“It's always a pleasure, Tony.” It's easy to relax into the banter, as it wasn't always, but she's learning.

“That it is, Ms Romanov.” She can hear the small sound of electronics sing on the line, always himself more in action than in words. “If I didn't know any better, I’d say you missed me.”

“It's a good job you know better, then.”

 

*

 

_Quiet is a never-known thing. She is close to sleeping, no warm body beside her to press in and hold her parts together._

_Yelena and Ivan and Madame B trade themselves between each other in a complex pas de trois through her mind. A knife is to a throat what a waist is to a pair of sure hands, a gravitational pull._

_Yelena is holding her hand and is holding a gun, is saying_ breathe me away, lisichka, _and pulling both their fingers to the trigger, barrel tight to her hummingbird chest. She doesn’t flinch at the jolt when the gun fires._

 _Yelena laughs, and pulls the gun back, revealing nothing blossoming at her heart._ Shall I turn it to you, sister?

_The moment drifts and her hands shake on the gun. Yelena feels cold against her, colder than skin should ever feel._

_Ivan has heavy hands on her shoulders and is pressing her to the floor, Yelena and the gun between her fingers. They feel solid as her bones, her feet raised up on points and balanced, so she might catch Madame B’s dark gaze._

_It fills her, the blood taste of it all, metal and chemical and salt-dipped copper. Her legs sweep out to topple them, but nothing falls under her. She is the unsolid, insubstantial, and they are real as the earth. She twists and writhes, bends her spine back to the point of snapping and continues the dance. Ivan hoists her up, spinning across the stark white floor. She kicks and points and pulls the knives from beneath her tutu with dancer’s fluidity. Ivan drops her at Madame B’s feet and she looks up, forever up. Thirty, sixteen, twelve, eight. She is small and Madame B is a belligerent titan pointing a gun to her head._

_She presses a kiss to Natasha’s crown._

_Natasha is not sleeping and there are no bodies and there is no one on her skin that is not a ghost but Yelena is there in her ear saying,_ Kiss me, lisichka, let us run together as the wolves do.

_She can still taste the sugar and morphine on Yelena’s lips._

_Natasha feels her body, heavy under the duvet and the dusky room, the touch of hands on her -  fingers opening and curling up and pulling her ragdoll body together, sweat and sweat and sweat all over._

_It is with her own hands a pressing weight on her belly and the quiet sound of the building settling in her ears that Natasha finally wakes up._

 

*

 

Natasha hunts the hallways of a crumbling apartment block with her head ducked and gun close to hand. Young girls, children, are singing songs in mandarin that echo eternally through the stairwells, long after she’s passed their subdued but smiling faces. It should be unnerving, but it’s not. It feels comfortable, the way the night does sometimes when she is alone and the streets are quiet.  

There are long strands of ivy which climb almost with purpose, not just along the outer brickwork but inside the warren-like hallways, twisting through the handrails and threatening to touch. Not to poison, just to touch skin.

From the dusty windows she can see lights springing up all across the town. Singapore seems like a quietly night-waking place.

She stops at the last apartment on the fifth level, numbers rubbed away but for a shadow on the door. She knocks twice and tucks her hand into her jacket, touching the body-warm metal of her gun.

There is a rustle of movement and a long pause, a silence. The occupant is waiting for something -

“ _Cestrum nocturnum_ ”, she says, voice pitched just enough to hold authority. “Night blooming Jasmine, native to many places, including Singapore.”

The deadbolt clicks, and four sharper, electrical clicks follow, and slowly, he opens the door.

She smiles at him, still on the opposite side of the threshold.

“I’m gonna need a new hiding place”, Bruce says, arms wide, expression cracked wider, a whole soul open on his face.

She eases herself into his arms. “You are a complete motherfucker to find. And I am very good at finding things.”

He lifts her up onto her toes and then further so her feet are lifted above the ground, his face turned down toward hers until their mouths meet. He pulls back to breathe, twirling her into the tiny apartment, says, “I am very good at getting lost.”

There is nothing remarkable about the space other than how unremarkable it is. There is nothing of Bruce in it, not even in the books on his shelves. There are, however,  potted plants dotted in every corner, sprawling on the desk and hung on the windowsills. There is a smokiness to the air, incense, but it smells of jasmine, through and through.

Bruce lifts her hand to his and twists their fingers together, leading her to his old sofa, sunken as it is against the living room wall. “I would ask you how, but I’m afraid of the answer.”

“Most likely a wise choice.” She tips her head onto his shoulder and releases every tension in herself. Relaxed and unfurled, she is only a woman, he only a man, and they are _fine._ “This feels dreamlike, almost, doesn’t it?”

He laughs and squeezes her hand. “I’d rather that than nightmare.”

“Never nightmare.” She twists herself so her face is close to his, the corners of her mouth turned up. “Are you waiting for me to say I’ve been dreaming of you?”

He blushes, hand inching up to sweep his hair from his face. “Wasn’t looking for it, but I’ll take it. I’ll take anything you’ll give me.”

She raises herself up and kisses his forehead, right where it creases. “Anything is a dangerous thing to promise.”

Her fingers trace easy lines along his chest and her mouth is close to his. There is trust in that - the act of passing breath from your mouth to another’s, being so close and so delicate with the other’s bones.

 

*

 

Airports are dreary, soul-filled places; saturated to the bursting with lost things and shadows. It’s easy for her to identify with - something huge and unfathomable, bigger than life, easy to duck down in and disappear. This one is full of dirty white and grey; shadows of people all tired and dizzied by the air wandering the echoing halls. Two AM is always a transient time.

Clint is sat at the airport terminal, a newspaper in his hand hardly covering his face. The walls are greying on his skin; his clothes are loose and informal but hardly _him_ , his glasses, however are... the same as his costume. She arches an eyebrow at him, in lieu of hello.

He smiles and snaps the newspaper straight folding it in half and spreading it on his lap. “I don’t know what this says, but the picture implies it’s to do with three dogs, a goat and an old woman, who seems to be holding a cactus. What a timeless tale.” He grins up at her, eyes shining through the grey airport gloom.

She taps her foot once.

He drops the smile and taps the bench beside him gently. It’s only when he tilts his head and lets his eyes grow soft she takes the cold steel seat. He takes her right hand and traces his index fingers along each one of her knuckles. He says, “I'm here to take you home.”

The airport drifts in an ether, somehow worlds away from her body. Natasha thinks of the divine bruise on her hip, the night air in her lungs from after, a head stretching out of a window just straining for oxygen and starlight to fill her. She puts her left hand atop his, flattening the rough skin on top of her own, and looks up at him. “I'm not sure leaving would be in the right direction.”

Clint laughs. “You're so wrong, but it's okay, I’ll let you work that out for yourself.”

She smiles indulgently at him and slides the newspaper away. The arm of the bench is a small barrier between them, and easing herself over it is easy. It’s even easier to curl herself up small and perch on his lap. Natasha leans in very close, mouth grazing the skin of his throat, and whispers, “And how might you prove it to me, Hawkeye?”

Clint’s right arm curls up and around, is a comfortable weight balanced on her hip. “A great many ways, I assure you.” He tips their heads together, like they did on the earliest missions, playacting puppy love inasmuch as it could be called _play._ "Oh, and Wanda says hi, by the way. She's eagerly awaiting your return. Not that I can imagine _why…_ ”

“Oh, save it for the woman who told God she’d put up with you.” She bats at his shoulder and melts away.

“Really, Tas?” His fingers drift up to her throat, tangle in the short chain of the arrow necklace. “You've never proclaimed to the heavens when I’ve had my hands on you?” He traces the chain, draws the pattern across her skin, an arrow pressed from his fingers into her collarbone. She fights the shiver that draws up along her spine.  “I think that's a lie.”

“And I think you're an _asshole_.” Natasha stands and adjusts her clothes, holds a hand out for him to take. “And yet, I’ll let you take me home. Does that make me a masochist?”

He squeezes her hand and drags it out in front of him, pulling her back into him. “All of us are, Nat. All of us are.” He steals two kisses from her right there in the terminal and hoists her into his arms, bags over his good shoulder. "By the way Lor has dinner waiting. Her buttermilk chicken is divine."

 

**Author's Note:**

> a/n 3: confession: I didn't like ultron. not nat or clint's characterisation and certainly not the handling of the maximoffs.
> 
> i haven't squared a way in my head to deal with the latter part yet, but this is, at least, my way of compensating for nat's development, and a little of clint's (though I'm not done with that yet; serial womaniser and one half an epic on-off battle couple, married with kids and hidden away nowhere near bed-stuy? no idea how I feel about that development)
> 
> this is my fix it. my poetic love note to Natasha and her heart full of hungry things. also, did I mention nat is Russian? Russian is like it's own character here - and Sister-Fox owns my heart.


End file.
